Do it yourself

It has been hard to pick up any IT publication in the past six months and not read about the lack of technology skills in the UK, the falling number of graduates enrolling for IT courses and the increase in outsourcing.

Sector skills council e-Skills UK is undertaking some great work to raise awareness and address the issues at hand.

But e-Skills’ focus remains on getting more people with the right skills into the industry ­ is that the only solution to filling an impending skills gap?

If the IT industry requires 140,000 professionals per year, would we be closer to a solution if we could make new entrants four times more productive?

After all, improving productivity has been core to IT since its creation.

Large amounts of work which used to be undertaken by IT professionals have already been automated.

Programmers used to write specialised accounting and calculation applications to automate tasks.

Now, many IT workers ­ who would not necessarily be classified as programmers ­ are creating business solutions using spreadsheets because it is quicker than using a programmer.

Social networking sites, meanwhile, provide an up-to-date example of using technology to automate tasks previously undertaken by developers.

Creating a simple web site used to require programming in HTML and JavaScript ­ and if it was a transactional site, IT managers would also need to write
server-side code in an additional language.

Today, complex sites can be created on the web without writing a single line of HTML code through Web 2.0 platforms such as MySpace, Facebook and Bebo.

And through Amazon and eBay, complete online retail operations can be created without using PHP, Java or Active Server Pages.

The trend is something of a silent revolution, but it has a name: end user development (EUD) ­ the creation of systems by people who are not trained or employed as programmers.

The University of Manchester is one of the key supporters of e-Skills UK and is also a key researcher into EUD.

Its findings indicate that there will be only three million professional programmers in the US by 2012, compared with 90 million end user developers.

Such developments could be the key to unlocking improvements in productivity ­ here are a couple of real-life examples of how much further innovative companies could take EUD.

A major global bank started a project with offshore development and later provided the same specifications to a set of developers using a productivity tool.

The result: a team of 30 offshore developers completed the project after six months; five developers using productivity tools finished it in three months.
In the second example, an insurance standards body had to produce a number of complex forms based on XML standards that were developed for insurers and brokers to exchange business.

Rather than just look at tools for building forms quickly, the organisation adopted software that converted existing XML standards into usable documents.

Just like engineers who create smart factories, we need more software firms to focus on productivity tools for the masses, rather than enriching development for the niche programmer market.

We need companies to adopt more innovative approaches, such as EUD, instead of relying on programmers.

However, do not expect the major software companies that derive their revenues from IT professionals to drive the trend.

After all, EUD is not in their interests; but innovation is already out there and it is being driven by smaller companies with specialist market skills.

I am not proclaiming the end of programming, but the birth of programming without code for everyone.

Dharmesh Mistry is chief technology and operations officer at edge IPK

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